Ecosystem Services in South Africa

Integration of Ecosystem Services into Land Use Planning in Mozambique

“…The integration of ES into planning has mainly been debated at a theoretical level (Hansen and Pauleit 2014), but there is less evidence on the efforts proposing the integration of ES into decisions made in land utilization (Martinez-harms et al 2015;Ruckelshaus et al 2015;Ashnani et al 2018). Although in the last decade the number of ES assessments has increased, as shown by the recent studies made at supranational (IPBES 2018a(IPBES , 2018b(IPBES , 2018cMaes et al 2020), national (Sarukhan et al 2010;Bateman et al 2013;Bauler and Pipart 2013;Frélichová et al 2014;Ouyang et al 2016;Byg et al 2017;Sutherland and Mazeka 2019;Mugiraneza et al 2019) and regional levels (María Paula and Néstor Oscar 2012;Mckenzie et al 2014;Ruckelshaus et al 2015;Cabral et al 2016;Camps-Calvet et al 2016;Nikodinoska et al 2018), there are still difficulties in defining and operationalizing ES within planning due to rigid regulatory frameworks and inadequate tools (Di Marino et al 2019). Additionally, the lack of consensual methodologies for assessing ES in biophysical and economic terms, to represent ES spatially, and to interpret and utilize this information at the normative level in plans and projects, represent important obstacles to the effective integration of ES in LUP.…”